Tony Smith | |
|---|---|
 Tony Smith with his sculptureThe Snake Is Out inBryant Park in 1967 | |
| Born | Anthony Peter Smith (1912-09-23)September 23, 1912 |
| Died | December 26, 1980(1980-12-26) (aged 68) |
| Known for | Sculpture,visual arts |
| Spouse | Jane Lawrence |
| Children | 3, includingKiki Smith andSeton Smith |
| Website | www |
Anthony Peter Smith (September 23, 1912 – December 26, 1980) was an Americansculptor,painter,architectural designer, and a notedart theorist.[1] As a leading sculptor in the 1960s and 1970s, Smith is often associated with theminimalist art movement.
Smith was born inSouth Orange, New Jersey, to awaterworks manufacturing family started by his grandfather and namesake, A. P. Smith. Tony contractedtuberculosis around 1916, which lasted through much of elementary school.[2] In an effort to speed his recovery, protect his immune system, and protect his siblings, his family constructed a one-room prefabricated house in the backyard. He had a full-time nurse and had tutors to keep up with his school work; he sporadically attended Sacred Heart Elementary School inNewark, New Jersey. His medicine came in little boxes which he used to form cardboard constructions. Sometimes he visited the waterworks factory, marveling at the industrial production, machines and fabrication processes.[2]
Smith commuted toSt. Francis Xavier High School, aJesuit high school in New York City.[2] In the spring and summer of 1931 he attendedFordham University, and in the fall enrolled atGeorgetown University.[2] Smith was disillusioned with formal education, and returned to New Jersey in January 1932, where, during the Great Depression, he opened a second-hand bookstore in Newark on Broad Street.[2] From 1934 to 1936, he worked days at the family factory and attended evening courses at theArt Students League of New York where he studied anatomy withGeorge Bridgman, drawing and watercolor withGeorge Grosz, and painting withVaclav Vytlacil.[2] In 1937, he moved toChicago intending to study architecture at theNew Bauhaus, where he readily absorbed the interdisciplinary curriculum but was ultimately disillusioned. The following year, Smith began working forFrank Lloyd Wright'sArdmore Project near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he began as a carpenter helper and bricklayer. After a brief period with Wright inTaliesin inSpring Green, Wisconsin, Smith worked building the Armstrong House inOgden Dunes, Indiana.[citation needed] This period ended when his mother fell ill in 1940 and Smith returned to New Jersey.
In 1940, Smith began his career as an independent architectural designer, which lasted until the early 1960s. He built approximately twenty private homes and envisioned many unrealized projects, such as the 1950 ModelRoman Catholic Church, with paintings on glass byJackson Pollock (1950). His work included homes for many in the art community, includingFritz Bultman (1945),Theodoros Stamos,Fred Olsen (1951), andBetty Parsons (1959-60).[3][4][2] Despite these successes, the architect-client relationship frustrated Smith enough that he gravitated toward his own artwork.[3]
Smith returned to the East Coast after two years inHollywood, California (1943–45) and began teaching while developing architectural projects at the same time as developing various theoretical ideas aboutpainting abstractly. He became a central member of theNew York School community, with ties ranging fromGerome Kamrowski toJackson Pollock,Barnett Newman andMark Rothko.[1]
He lived in Germany and traveled extensively in Europe from 1953 to 1955, accompanying his wife Jane who was there as anopera singer. There he developed a new group of architectural projects and painted extensively, including the landmark group of Louisenberg paintings (1953–1955).Chiara "Kiki" Smith was born in 1954, when they were living inNuremberg. Twins Beatrice (Bebe) andSeton were born after the family returned to South Orange, in 1955.[1]
Smith taught architecture and design-related classes at the Delahanty Institute (1956–57) andPratt Institute (1957–1959), where he developedThrone (1956). This critical early work developed from a class assignment for students at Pratt to determine the simplest possible three-dimensional joint that could be stacked for more than two levels. Smith enhanced the geometrical solution of four triangular prisms by adding another joint, resulting in a new form with seven triangular prisms enclosing two tetrahedra. After some time passed, he decided that the resulting form was something other than a design exercise, so he titled itThrone.
Smith then joined the faculty atBennington College in Vermont. In 1960 a class project investigating close-packed cells based onD'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's bookGrowth & Form (1918) sparked Smith's search for artistic inspiration in the natural world. The resulting agglomeration of 14-sidedtetrakaidecahedrons, the ideally efficient soap-bubble cell, is known as the Bennington Structure. This was the first time Smith saw the impact that enlarged geometric shapes could have as independent but architecturally scaled forms - as sculpture.While recovering from an automobile accident at home in 1961, Smith started to create small sculptural maquettes using agglomerations of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. By 1962 he was teaching at Hunter College. In this year he createdBlack Box, his first fabricated steel sculpture. The dense rectangular prism, less than two feet high, developed from a mundane object, a 3 x 5" file card box that Smith saw on the desk of American Art critic and historianEugene Goosen, his colleague and friend. Smith enlarged the proportions of the box five times, like a recent class assignment. He phoned a local fabricator, Industrial Welding, whose billboard he had seen while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and asked them to deliver it to his suburban home. Although the welders assumed he was crazed, they treated the project with the utmost workmanship and the result was a stunning form to Smith. With this piece, entitledBlack Box, Smith had discovered a sculpting process that he continued to hone. Where others saw a pure geometric shape, Smith saw it as a mysterious form. The title alluded to the corrupt administration of New York mayor Jimmy Walker (1926–32), when contractors would drop bribes into a slot in a "black" box.[5]Black Box was set on the site of the black wood-burning stove in the little house he had lived in as a small child, so it functioned as a kind of gravestone.[citation needed] It was deliberately placed on a thin base of two-by-four inch plywood pieces to call attention to its status as a work of art.
In 1962, he madeDie, a 6'steel cube that established his reputation as one of the most influential and important artists of his time.[6]The Elevens Are Up (1963) follows formally onDie. Inspired by the two veins on the back of the neck which are accentuated when one has had too much to drink, the sculpture consists of two black steel masses installed face to face, four feet apart. Fabricated in steel and weighing over 12,000 pounds, the laterSource (1967) is a monumental sculpture which Smith first exhibited atdocumenta IV inKassel, Germany in the summer of 1968.[7] After exhibiting massive, black-paintedplywood andmetal works at several sites across the United States and internationally, Smith was featured on the October 13, 1967 cover ofTime with his plywood structureSmoke (1967)[8] enveloping the atrium of theCorcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.[9]
Allied with theminimalist school, Smith worked with simple geometrical modules combined on a three-dimensional grid, creating drama through simplicity and scale. During the 1940s and 1950s Smith became close friends withBarnett Newman,Jackson Pollock,Mark Rothko, andClyfford Still. His sculpture shows their abstract influence. One of Smith's unrealized architectural projects in 1950 was a plan for a church that was to have painted glass panels designed in collaboration with his friend Pollock.[10]
Smith also taught at various institutions includingNew York University,Cooper Union,Pratt Institute,Bennington College, andHunter College, where he mentored artists such asPat Lipsky.
Smith was asked to teach a sculpture course at theUniversity of Hawaii inManoa during the summer of 1969. He designed two unrealized works,Haole Crater (a recessed garden) andHubris, but eventually createdThe Fourth Sign that was sited on the campus. His Hawaii experience also generated fodder for his "For..." series whose initials are friends and artists he met during his time in Manoa.
In 2024,MIT Press published theTony SmithCatalogue Raisonné Volume 1 Sculpture[11] andVolume 2 Architecture[12] both edited by James Voorhies and Sarah Auld.
Smith's first exhibitions were in 1964, and he had his first one-person exhibition in 1966. That same year, was asked to anchor the seminal 1966 show at theJewish Museum in New York entitledPrimary Structures, one of the most important exhibitions of the 1960s.[13] Smith's museum debut as a sculptor of large-scale, geometric sculpture was at theWadsworth Atheneum,Hartford, Connecticut, and theInstitute of Contemporary Art,University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1966), followed by a nationwide traveling exhibition that began at theAndrew Dickson White House,Cornell University inIthaca, New York (1968), and a New Jersey–based traveling show organized by theNewark Museum andNew Jersey State Council on the Arts (1970).[8]
A major retrospective, "Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor," was held at theMuseum of Modern Art inNew York in 1998, including his architecture, painting, and sculpture. A European retrospective followed in 2002, arranged by theInstitut Valencià d'Art Modern,Spain and theMenil Collection,Houston, organized a retrospective of Smith's works on paper in 2010.[14] Smith was also included in a Guggenheim International Exhibition, New York (1967); theVenice Biennale (1968);documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968); Whitney Annual,Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1966, 1970, and 1971); andWhitney Biennial, New York (1973).[8]
September 23, 2012 marked the one hundredth anniversary of Smith's birth. Institutions around the world celebrated his centennial with special events, including a daylong symposium at theNational Gallery of Art, a panel discussion at theSeattle Art Museum, an outdoor sculpture installation atBryant Park in New York, and the exhibition "Kiki Smith, Seton Smith, Tony Smith: A Family of Artists", which opened at theKunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, that day.[15]
Smith's work is included in most leading international public collections, including theMuseum of Modern Art, New York;Menil Collection, Houston; theGovernor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, NY;Walker Art Center,Minneapolis;Louisiana Museum of Modern Art,Humlebæk, Denmark; and theKröller-Müller Museum,Otterlo, the Netherlands.[16] In 2003, theNational Gallery of Art in Washington acquired one of four casts of Smith's first steel sculpture,Die, created in 1962 and fabricated in 1968, fromPaula Cooper Gallery.[17]
Smoke (1967) currently fills the 60-foot highatrium leading into theLos Angeles County Museum of Art’s Ahmanson Building; the museum purchased the work in 2010.[18]
The estate of Tony Smith is currently represented byPace Gallery in New York.[19]
Smith met his wife, opera singer and actressJane Lawrence, in New York in 1943. They moved to Los Angeles and were married in Santa Monica, withTennessee Williams as the only witness.[2]
He was the father of artistsChiara "Kiki" Smith,Seton Smith, and the underground actress Beatrice "Bebe" Smith (Seton's twin, who died in 1988).
In 1961, Smith was injured in a car accident and subsequently developedpolycythemia, a blood condition which produces a large number of red blood cells. His health was always in question and deteriorated until he succumbed to aheart attack at age 68 on December 26, 1980.[2] At the time of his death, he and his family resided inSouth Orange, New Jersey.
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